(Screengrab: The Times of Israel) The video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel's 2008-09 "Operation Cast Lead," and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa. A video distributed by the Israeli military in July suggesting that Palestinian fighters had fired from the Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City was not shot during the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, and both audio and video clips were manipulated to cover up the fact that they were from entirely different incidents, a Truthout investigation has revealed. The video, released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on July 23, the same day Israeli airstrikes destroyed Al Wafa, was widely reported by pro-Israeli publications and websites as proving that the hospital was destroyed because Hamas had turned the hospital into a military facility. But the video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel's 2008-09 "Operation Cast Lead," and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa. The misleading video was only the last in a series of IDF dissimulations about Al Wafa hospital that included false claims that Hamas rockets had been launched from the hospital grounds, or very near it, and that the hospital had been damaged by an attack on the launching site. The IDF began to prepare the ground for the destruction of Al Wafa hospital well before Israeli ground troops entered Gaza on July 17. On July 11, the IDF fired four warning rockets on the fourth floor of Al Wafa, making a large hole in the ceiling - the standard IDF signal that a building was going to be destroyed by an airstrike. On July 17, the hospital was hit by a total of 15 rockets, according to Dr. Basman Alashi, Al Wafa's director. After the first few rockets, a phone call from the IDF "asked how much time do you need to evacuate?" he told Truthout. After the second and third floors were largely destroyed, the patients' rooms were filled with smoke and the hospital lost electricity, he gave the order to evacuate the hospital. An IDF spokesman told Allison Deger of Mondoweiss that Hamas rocket

launches had come "from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near." A slide show released by the IDF August 19 includes an aerial view of Al Wafa Hospital with two alleged rocket launching sites marked that are clearly much farther from the hospital than the 100 meters.

Even if that IDF claim of 100 meters were accurate, however, it was more than sufficient to allow the IDF to hit the launch site with precision-guided munitions without damaging the hospital. Israeli air to ground missiles, especially those fired from drones, are known to be able to hit small targets without causing collateral damage to nearby buildings. An IDF video posted on August 9, for example, shows a missile destroying what is said to be a hidden rocket launch site without harming a mosque only a few meters away from the explosion.

IDF spokesman Captain Eytan Buchman nevertheless blandly suggested that it was collateral damage from striking the launch site. He said the IDF was "left with no choice" but to "target the launcher with the most precise munitions capable of ensuring its destruction."

On July 21, the IDF Spokesman's Office pushed its propaganda line linking Al Wafa and rocket launching sites even further, claiming in a tweet and on its blog, "Hamas fires rockets from Wafa hospital in the Gaza neighborhood of Shujaiya." Under that headline was an aerial photo enhanced to highlight what was said to be Al Wafa Hospital, along with a red dot representing an M-75 rocket launch site that was not on the hospital grounds, but appeared to be a few meters away.

But the building shown in the aerial photo was not Al Wafa hospital, as Dr. Alashi quickly pointed out. A Google map of Al Wafa hospital shows none of the buildings resemble the one the IDF identified as Al Wafa. The building in the IDF image belongs to the Right to Life Society.

After that prevarication had been revealed, the IDF added a new claim that "the hospital grounds" had been used by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as "a post enabling terrorists to open fire at soldiers."

The IDF said that Hamas had "fired at Israel and at IDF forces from the hospital" despite warnings from the IDF, and the IDF had been forced to attack targets on the hospital site.

The statement was accompanied by a video purporting to document the firing at Israeli troops. Based on the camera angle and altitude, the video was taken by an Israeli drone, according to a former US intelligence officer, with experience in interpreting military-related images, who analyzed the video for Truthout.

The first segment of the video is a grainy, black-and-white aerial shot of a building that starts with the legend, "Terrorists Threaten IDF from inside Wafa Hospital." The building shown is not Al Wafa hospital, however, but an annex to the hospital that had been empty, both Dr. Alashi and Charlie Andeasson, a Swedish activist who was in the hospital when it was attacked on July 16, told Truthout.

The eight-second video shows what could be two brief bursts of fire from one of the windows on the third floor and then a third flash in a fourth story window. The former US intelligence officer confirmed that the footage of the building was selected from two different times of day. After the first three seconds of the video, the camera angle and the amount of light both change perceptibly. Nevertheless an exchange between the two voices on the audiotape accompanying the video continues as though the scene were continuous during the entire eight seconds.

The first voice heard on the audio recording says, in Hebrew, "Do you see this firing? Have spotted fires from within the house." The English subtitles accompanying the audio add "hospital" in parentheses after the word "house," but Seattle-based blogger on Israeli affairs Richard Silverstein, who speaks Hebrew, confirmed to Truthout after listening to the audio clip that the speaker uses the word "bayit," which can only mean "house."

A second voice then says, according to the subtitles, "Positive, fire from within the house." But the speaker actually uses the term "small house" ("bayit ha katan hazeh"), according to Silverstein.

Those references to firing from a small house indicate that the audio clip was taken from an entirely different incident at another location. That device was obviously used because there was no audio of an incident involving firing from the hospital.

Dr. Alashi said he believes the eight-second video clip portrays firing from the annex that occurred in the 2008-09 Israeli attack on Gaza. "People confirmed to me that there was firing from the building then," he told Truthout. That building was, in fact, attacked on January 16, 2009, by Israeli tanks only 70 meters away from the hospital, damaging the third and fourth floors of the building - the very floors from which the flashes are shown in the video - as the UN Fact-Finding Mission noted in its September 2009 report.

The last segment of the video showing the bombing of the Al Wafa hospital, bears the legend "secondary explosion" - meaning explosions of weapons - as each building is shown being destroyed, in line with the Israeli argument throughout the operation that Hamas stored rockets and other weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.

The video fist shows the hospital itself being blown up, followed by heavy billowing smoke covering the entire hospital and then another flash of fire. But the former intelligence official who viewed the video said that flash indicated another Israeli missile strike on the target rather than a secondary explosion.

The clip then cuts to the destruction of the annex, again with the "secondary explosion" legend. The billowing smoke from the initial bomb explosion covers the building, and then two or three small puffs of darker smoke appear. Those puffs of smoke would suggest a secondary explosion, according to the former US intelligence officer. But he also observed that a hospital would have flammable materials other than hidden weapons that could cause the darker smoke to appear.

Given the existence of Hamas' complex network of tunnels, which provided plenty of storage space for its rockets and other weaponry, it would have made no sense for Hamas to store rockets in a hospital that it knew had already been targeted by the IDF.

In its final seconds, the video focuses in to show a square which the legend describes as a “tunnel opening near Al Wafa.” But Dr. Alashi told Truthout that it is actually a water well.

The IDF real reason for the destruction of Al Wafa hospital appears to be related to the determination to raise the cost to the civilian population of Gaza for Palestinian resistance, in line with the approach represented by its "Dahiya doctrine," named after the Beirut suburb dominated by Hezbollah, much of which the Israeli Air Force reduced to rubble in the 2006 war.

That strategy, recognized as a violation of the international laws of war, was pursued most obviously in the complete destruction of every house in several square blocks in three separate areas of the Shujaiya district of Gaza City July 19-20. But it was also evident in IDF attacks on Al Wafa and in the series of mortar and artillery attacks on six different UN shelters from July 21 though August 3. Those attacks killed a total of 47 civilians and wounded 341, according to a survey of the incidents by The Guardian.

In none of the six cases where UN shelters were hit by IDF mortar shells was the military able to offer a plausible explanation, and in three cases, it offered no explanation whatever.

A
lawsuit was filed on Saturday against Israel by actors, activists,
politicians and pro-Palestinian solidarity groups in Argentina, a
statement released by the Palestinian embassy in Buenos Aires said.
The case was brought before the federal court of justice in the city of
Cordoba. The
case was named "Lawsuit against the Authorities of Israel for
Committing Crimes against Humanity and Genocide against the Palestinian
people in the Gaza Strip."
Journalist Serkhio Ortiz, head of the Argentinean committee of
honoring the missing and victims, actor Juan Jose-Tutu, and singer and
actress Mara Santosho, were among the people who signed the case.
The signatories called in their lawsuit for issuing an
international arrest warrant against Israeli figures through the
Interpol and forcing Israel to compensate for the human and material
losses that it had caused during its war on Gaza.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has said that 111 of its installations in the Gaza Strip had been damaged during the 51-day Israeli aggression on the enclave. It added that three of those installations were completely destroyed and are in need of reconstruction. UNRWA said that it started to assess the extent of damage in its installations as a result of what it called the “hostilities between Hamas and Israel” in Gaza. The international agency that its Infrastructure and Camp Improvement program teams toured those installations to evaluate the damage.

It is really hard to underestimate the brutal ugliness of the Jewish-Zionist mentality. This is why serious and honest writers should never flinch from comparing Israel, its actions and behaviors with Nazi Germany, its actions and behavior.

Some writers and intellectuals would simply cringe and cower at the first test. They would betray their conscience as soon as the Judeo-Nazis start hurling at them the false charges of anti-Semitism.

They would stop calling the spade a spade, especially when they see the figurative implement firmly in the evil hands of the Judeo-Nazis, the Zionist Jews, and the Nazis of our time.

Others, who value their rectitude and moral conscience, wouldn't be intimidated by the vociferousness of Zionist barking.

But these are few in numbers, and are likely to suffer marginalization and estrangement as a result of upholding their moral conscience.

Well, truly great people are always small in number.

Investigating Hamas's crimes!

A few days ago, the Israeli media reported that some Zionist circles had urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to investigate the apparently accidental death of a Jewish settler child during the recent Israeli holocaust in Gaza.

Three or four Israeli civilians were killed purportedly by projectiles fired from the Gaza Strip on nearby Jewish settlements. But there has been no independent or third- party confirmation that the few civilian casualties on the Israeli side were indeed caused by the nearly notoriously inaccurate and virtually innocuous rockets fired from the besieged Gaza Strip.

On the other hand, it is now confirmed beyond any shred of doubt that as many as 2200 Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, were brutally murdered and that as many as 13,000 others were wounded, many with serious injuries and disabilities that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

It is also believed that as many as 500 Palestinian children were killed and several thousand others were injured in the recent Gaza holocaust.

In addition to human losses, the Israeli forces utterly destroyed some 50,000 houses, and many other buildings. Hospitals, colleges and other public buildings were also destroyed. Some Old German citizens have compared the recent Gaza holocaust with the fire-storm bombing of the city of Dresden in 1945.

Satanic Mentality

For those unaware of the Talmudic mentality that shapes and rules the collective classical Jewish-Zionist mind, it may be difficult to understand the fact that most Jews in Israel and abroad give far more attention to the death of a single Jewish child than they would give to the mass murder of thousands of non-Jewish children. The classical Jewish motto, proclaimed by most Zionist rabbis is that a thousand Arab lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail!

Yet this factual truth, which no amount of hasbara (Zionist propaganda) or disinformation or deliberate malicious lies could blur or obliterate, is an outstanding fact of life in Israel today.

Look, this is not a theatrical propaganda contest between a Palestinian writer and the Israeli hasbara machine. I am always willing and ready to prove the veracity of every word I write and substantiate every accusation I make against Zionist Jews...

I actually challenge any Jewish writer or intellectual from Tel Aviv to New York and from Sydney to Los Angeles to prove me wrong. But I won't stop calling the spade a spade especially when the spade happens to be in the hands of my people's grave-diggers.

Besides, I' m not really overly eager to demonize Jews or their religion. In fact, I am mainly interested in making people, including Jews; discover the extent to which Zionist supremacists have deviated from the authentic teachings of Judaism, the Judaism of the Ten Commandments, upon which universal morality is more or less based.

We do know that any credible moral system based on the Ten Commandments must utterly reject the murder of innocent human beings. It would also reject the oppression of man by his fellow man. The Jewish Bible does contain numerous verses reminding Israelites to be just and refrain from oppressing others….because you were oppressed by the Pharaohs in the Land of Egypt.

For example, in Exodus: 22: 21, The Almighty warns the Israelites (e.g. Jews) against even mistreating others, let alone murdering them. "You must not mistreat or oppress foreigners in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt."

Now, in light of the genocidal atrocities Israel has been meting out to the helpless and unprotected Palestinians, one might really wonder what type of Bible these Judo-Nazi thugs, people like Binyamin Netanyahu, Moshe Yaalon and other war criminals, are following. Are they following the Bible of Moses or the Bible of Hitler? Do they obtain their moral ideals from the Ten Commandments or from Mein Kampf?

These are extremely legitimate and fundamental questions that ought to be invoked if one takes God, religion and even morality seriously.

Evil Cult

The truth of the matter, at least as this writer sees it, is that the present Judaism as practiced by the bulk of world Jewry has actually nothing to do with the true, authentic Judaism, which the Almighty revealed unto Moses.

What else can be said of a "religion" that teaches that non-Jews are virtual animals and that their lives have absolutely no sanctity? Is this really what God told Moses? I challenge every Jewish rabbi and intellectual under the sun to stand up and answer this question honestly and courageously.

I am not making baseless accusations or anti-Semitic insinuations. There are numerous rabbis, not marginal ones, in Israel and abroad who shamelessly teach and preach in their synagogues that non-Jews are actually animals walking on two legs. These rabbis are not demented or deranged individuals who don't know what they are talking about. They are actually celebrated Torah sages, enjoying widespread esteem and having high stature in their respective communities and beyond.

I really don't know how true Judaism would justify dropping one-ton bombs from high altitudes on apartment buildings packed with innocent men, women and children, hospitals and heavily-populated neighborhoods.

I don't really know how true Judaism would justify murdering sleeping babies and their breast-feeding mothers, huddling in fear in their refugee shacks? Is this the divine message that God entrusted to the Children of Israel?

Unfortunately, the radical metamorphoses that morphed the true, original Judaism into a criminally-racist cult is the responsibility of those so-called Talmudic sages who effectively obliterated all universal dimensions of Judaism, replacing these dimensions with an appalling parochial particularism, which eventually reduced itself into a nefariously racist cult, shrouded in a scandalously pseudo- religious shell, and adopting an extremely evil outlook toward the rest of the world.

Otherwise, where in the Ten Commandments and other revelations received by Moses is stated that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity or that it is possible to murder a non-Jew without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt? (An Israeli air-force commander was quoted as saying that he sleeps well and had no feeling of guilt every time he murdered Palestinian civilians.)!!!

I really feel sorry for the Jews of our time. They have utterly lost every semblance of morality, which would conceivably give them a feeling that they occupy a moral high-ground in comparison to the rest of mankind. You have lost that real or imagined moral high-ground, ostensibly irreversibly. Don't take this lightly. This monumental calamity is tantamount to death.

Ismail
Haneyya, the Deputy Head of Hamas political bureau, urged Palestinian
Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas to sign the Rome Statute, which
will allow Palestine to join the International Criminal Court (ICC)
and prosecute the Israeli war criminals. Delivering Friday's sermon
on the ruins of al-Susi mosque in Gaza City, Haneyya said that Hamas
Movement and the Palestinian factions had signed the document they were
asked to sign, in order to urge Abbas to sign the Rome Statute,
stressing the importance of signing so as to prosecute the “Zionist war
criminals” at the ICC.
He also praised the Palestinian citizens' steadfastness and
sacrifices and that they embraced the resistance during the Israeli
aggression, confirming that all the houses, mosques, schools,
ministries and hospitals the occupation destroyed will be rebuilt.
He said: "Our message to the occupation is that you can demolish
the mosques but not the thoughts, you can take minarets down but you
cannot destroy our determination".
Haneyya hailed the international solidarity rallies with the
Palestinian people during the aggression, especially in Europe and
Latin America, which included organizing major demonstrations and
recalling ambassadors from Israel.
Haneyya expressed his gratitude to the countries which supported
the Palestinian people politically and financially, especially Turkey
and Qatar. He also thanked Egypt for its role in reaching a ceasefire
agreement, and he urged it to pursue its efforts to follow up on
implementation of what has been agreed upon.